


Not Okay

by msred



Series: Lessons [5]
Category: Actor RPF, American (US) Actor RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF, Real Person Fiction
Genre: 2020 US Presidential Election, Angst, Comfort/Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Long-Distance Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27416032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msred/pseuds/msred
Summary: It's not okay. She's not okay, and she's not going to be okay. Because everything sucks. Except maybe him.**NOT part of "Starting Over"**
Relationships: Chris Evans (Actor) & Original Female Character(s), Chris Evans (Actor)/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Lessons [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2019040
Comments: 30
Kudos: 33





	Not Okay

**Author's Note:**

> As noted in the summary, this story is not part of my ongoing series "Starting Over." The female protagonist in this story does have some similarities to that Narrator (from things as small as her hatred of the Patriots to much larger ones like her occupation), but this story does not at all fit into the timeline of that series (if you follow that series, you'll see what I mean pretty quickly, and if you don't, well, this doesn't really matter!) and therefore this is a different character from that one and this story takes place within a whole different universe, so to speak.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she says suddenly, speaking over Jake Tapper as she leans forward to set her half-full mug on the coffee table. She can’t sit there any longer, listening to pundits project and spew one electoral math word problem after another. Chris looks at her a little funny but doesn’t say anything other than  _ Okay, see you in a bit _ before squeezing her thigh and giving her a subdued smile.

No, she didn’t really need a shower. She’d taken one just before bed, and they’d only been up for less than an hour with no plans to be going anywhere or doing anything any time soon - even the work she has to do at some point can be done on her own time and in her pajamas, if that’s how she chooses to do it. She’s grateful he didn’t call her out on it, because she wouldn’t have been able to give him a decent reason for her sudden need for cleanliness.

As soon as she’s under the steaming spray she lets herself go, wrapping her arms around herself as her chest heaves and the tears roll down her cheeks. She tries for a second to retain at least a little bit of her composure, thinking she can maybe keep it limited to a few silent, dignified tears. But her chest hurts, a painful, throbbing pressure right behind her breastplate, and her stomach rolls, threatening to expel the few sips of coffee she’d forced down, and before she even knows what’s happening, sobs are pushing up from her chest, through her throat, and past her lips. She gives in, slumping back against the cool tile wall and letting her head hang, her tears dropping down around her feet with the streams from the shower head.

Chris thought it was odd when she suddenly proclaimed that she was off to take a shower, her coffee unfinished and her hair still a little damp in spots from going to bed so quickly after her shower the night before. But she hadn’t really left any room for argument, and she hadn’t said it in that tone she uses when she’s inviting him to come along, so he didn’t say anything, just let her go. He doesn’t realize how  _ long  _ she’s been gone until Dodger stands from his bed, stretches, and walks over to the couch to sniff the spot where she’d been sitting before jumping up to take it over, laying on his side and flopping his head onto Chris’s thigh. He checks the time on his phone, and he doesn’t know exactly when she’d left, but he does some mental math, accounting for things like when they’d gotten out of bed, the change in show hosts that had taken place since she’d been gone, and the timestamps on his text conversation with his brother, and he figures it’s been somewhere in the range of 45 minutes that she’s been gone. She enjoys a nice long shower from time to time, but he’s never known her to take one  _ that  _ long when he wasn’t in there with her, distracting her.

“Alright Bubba, I can take a hint,” he says, scratching the dog between the ears before carefully lifting his fluffy head off his leg. “I’ll go check on our girl. You keep our seats warm until we get back.”

“Hey babe,” he calls as soon as he’s in the bedroom and sees that the door to the en suite is ajar, “you know I’ve got one of those tankless water heaters, right? If you’re trying to see how long the hot water will,” he trails off when he steps into the bathroom and doesn't see her. The water’s running, the room full of steam, the shower door closed, but he doesn’t see her anywhere. He takes a couple more steps into the room then finally sees her. The vanity had been blocking his view before, which was only possible because she’s huddled in the corner on the floor of the shower stall, her back pressed into the corner where the two tiled walls meet, her knees pulled so tightly to her chest that her heels touch her butt, arms wound tightly around her legs and her forehead on her knees. Her body’s shaking and he can just hear her sobs over the running water.

“Baby,” he lunges for the shower door, yanking it open and reaching for the water control before thinking twice and taking a second to pull his hoodie over his head. It’s brand new, a gift she’d brought with her to replace the ‘abomination’ he always wore, and he’s worried that getting it wet under the shower spray without having washed it for the first time might result in the bright royal blue dye running, staining both their skin and the ivory shower tiles. He tosses the sweatshirt behind him and reaches for the shower handle with one hand and the towel hanging on the wall with the other. As soon as the water flow tapers off to a drip he steps into the shower, aware but not caring that he might get the hems of his pant legs wet.

“C’mere,” he coos, his voice as soft and soothing as he can make it as he squats at her side to drape the towel over her back and wrap it around her. He pulls it around her shoulders and rubs carefully over her biceps, pulling gently as he does to coax her arms away from her legs. She sits up a little straighter, her head still hanging but her hands coming up to hold the corners of the towel, freeing his hands so that he can wrap one arm around her back and work the other under her knees, pulling her body against his chest as he stands.

“My hair’s really wet,” she tells him around sniffles and choked-off sobs as she lets her head fall to his shoulder as if she can’t possibly bear the weight of it. Maybe she can’t right now, he thinks.

“I don’t care,” he tells her, but as he passes by the shelf of neatly folded (by her) clean towels on his way out of the room, he grabs one, because while he may not be bothered by the water running down his chest and back, he knows it will bother her that she’s causing him such inconvenience and discomfort (or something equally nonsensical).

She lets herself sink into him, trying to soak up the warmth and comfort that his body provides, but even that is difficult. At the moment all she feels is pain, despair, and she thinks to herself that the best she can hope for is numb.

“What’s wrong sweetheart?” he asks her as he sits carefully at the foot of the bed, his one arm still curled securely around her back and the other working its way from under her legs to start patting at her hair with the towel he’d grabbed awkwardly, refusing to loosen his grip on her, as they’d headed out of the bathroom. She lets her knees fall to the side and curls herself around him, clinging to him. 

“I just,” she starts, her breath stuttering between the words as she turns to press her forehead to the crook of his neck and shoulder and snakes her arms under his and around his back, “I don’t,” she sucks in a breath, “don’t understand.”

“Don’t understand what, baby?”

“ _ How,”  _ she nearly wails, squeezing her eyes closed futilely against the fresh wave of tears that refuse to be deterred, running down her cheeks and onto his skin.

“Shh, baby, breathe,” he instructs, still squeezing small sections of her hair in the towel. He gets it, now. He shouldn’t have even had to ask, but he needed to be sure. 

He’s also stressed, frustrated, disheartened, all the things. But this, this is more than that. This is a full-blown panic attack. He’s only seen her like this once before, when he’d been visiting her and she’d come home from a school trip she’d been chaperoning, a chorus competition (and no, she’s  _ not  _ the chorus teacher, a fact that means absolutely nothing when the kids, most of whom are also her theatre and English class kids, ask her if she’ll please come along as the team mom because the  _ actual  _ teacher is there for the paycheck more than for them), and one of the kids had gotten severely ill on the bus and she’d been the one to tend to him until they’d gotten back to the school and she turned him over to his parents. Chris had been in the parking lot waiting with the parents when the bus pulled in, there to meet her and drive her home, and when she’d gotten off the bus and walked the young man to his parents, she’d been calm, cool, collected, exactly the person you’d want in charge in an emergency. But as soon as she was in the car and it was just the two of them, she’d fallen apart, much like she’s doing now. He sees her anxiety manifest in other ways on a more regular basis, but she’s got pretty good coping skills. Well, that and she’s gotten good at hiding it. But in the year and a half they’ve been together, while he’ll admit that they don’t spend as much time physically together as he would like (more so recently, though, which has been amazing and has gotten him thinking a lot about their future - and yes, he knows  _ exactly  _ how privileged he is that he can afford private charter flights to take the two of them back and forth when the rest of the world is locked down in a pandemic, but they have more free time on their hands now than they ever have at any other point in their relationship, and privileged as it is, he’s found a safe way for them to make the most of that, and he’s going to take advantage of it), they find ways to be together as often and for as long as possible, and they talk or video call daily when they’re not together, for the most part, and this kind of breakdown, this complete consumption by anxiety, is unlike almost anything he’s ever seen from her.

He was already glad she was there, that she’d managed to convince her principal to let her lead her virtual classes from outside the school building for the week (which he still thought was stupid - if the school was still conducting classes virtually because of the pandemic, why were the teachers being forced to come into the building to work rather than being allowed to do so from home, like the students were doing?). But when they’d originally made the plans for her to fly up to him the Saturday before election day and head back home the Saturday after, they’d been cautiously optimistic that they’d be spending much of the latter part of the visit celebrating (after spending the first part baking literally hundreds of cookies together in his kitchen then driving around Boston handing them out to voters waiting in line, from a safe distance, of course). But now all he can think about was how glad he is that she isn’t doing this alone. The thought of her sitting in her own shower, sobbing as the water pours down around her, with no one to come pull her out, to hold her, to stroke her hair and remind her to breathe, breaks his heart far more than the devastating election returns they’d been following. On top of that, for as selfish as he feels for even allowing the thought to pop into his head, he knows that caring for her is one of the only things keeping his own anxiety from taking root and spiralling wildly out of control.

He continues to hold her but shifts her on his lap a little so that he can press a hand to her chest after dropping the towel he’d been using on her hair to the floor by his feet. He takes slow, deliberate breaths, letting his own chest rise and fall as he uses the pressure of his hand to encourage her to do the same. After a few minutes she’s no longer hyperventilating and her tears have slowed to a manageable trickle, and he kisses her head occasionally and murmurs soft  _ That’s my girl _ s and  _ There you go _ s of encouragement. When her breathing mostly matches up with his, he moves his hand to curl a finger under her chin and tilt her head back so she’s looking up at him. “It’s not over,” he tells her, with more confidence than he actually feels. “We just have to wait, we knew it would probably be like this.”

She knows he’s right. She also knows it doesn’t change anything about what she’s feeling. Because it’s not about the result, not anymore. She takes a second to tend to the towel he’d wrapped around her, tucking in one corner so it won’t fall when she moves, and scoots back a little until she’s not sitting on his lap but right next to his leg on the mattress instead, her legs still tented over his lap and her hands falling to his sides, thumbs tracing mindlessly over the words and designs inked into his skin. “It doesn’t matter,” she tells him, refusing to make eye contact even as he continues to prop her head up. “It won’t matter.”

“What do you mean? Sure it will.”

She shakes her head and he lets his hand drop to the outside of her thigh, the other still curled around her neck where he’d worked it under her hair a while ago. “No matter who wins, it won’t be okay. I won’t be okay.” 

“Hey,” he says, ducking his head to invade her personal space and force her to look at him, “talk to me.”

She takes a deep breath and starts, still talking to his belly button more than to him. “I'm not okay because even if he loses, 65-million-plus people still voted for that man. It was bad enough when it happened the first time around, but you could chalk some of it up to ignorance, to misplaced optimism and faith in the fact that he was an 'outsider,' a 'businessman,' 'not a politician.' But this means that over 65 million people can look back on the past four years and say,  _ I want four more years of that.”  _ She pauses, takes another deep breath, because she can feel her heart starting to race again, can see her hands shaking against his skin. She balls them both into fists and wraps her arms around her own waist, opening her hands again only to dig her fingers into her sides. “Four more years of children in cages,” she goes on, her voice taking on a little tremble. “Four more years of mishandling a deadly pandemic and simultaneously working to chip away at healthcare for people who can't afford it any other way. Of stripping away the rights of LGBTQ individuals because of who they love or how they identify.” The tears are flowing again now, but she can’t stop. “Of telling women that they don't matter enough to get to have control over their own bodies, or demand a law that ensures equal pay. Of systemic racism and police brutality with no accountability or consequences.” Her head has dropped now and her voice shakes and he pulls her close again, wrapping both arms around her, and still she goes on. “Of speaking down to and insulting anyone who has a different opinion. Of leading purely by fear. Over 65 million Americans have said,  _ Yes, give me more of that, now.  _ What does that say about humanity? I just feel completely disillusioned about  _ people. _ ” She’s fully sobbing again, and all he can do is wrap one hand tight around her shoulder and run the other gently up and down her spine, trying not to disturb the towel she seems to really want to keep on. “My heart and my soul are broken. My chest hurts. My stomach hurts. And I just spent 20 minutes sobbing in your shower.”

He doesn’t tell her it was more than 20 minutes. Doesn’t tell her that number she’s so upset about is already significantly higher than the last time she saw it. Doesn’t tell her anything, because he knows there’s nothing he can say that’s going to make her feel any better. He’d had a hard time with that, at first. He still remembers one particular time, early in their relationship, when she’d been having a hard time due to a lot of factors, many of them school and student related. He’d kept trying to help her, to give advice or say things that he hoped might fix it, and every time she just seemed to shoot him down. Finally she’d said, her voice gentle but exasperated, “You don’t  _ get  _ it, Chris. You can’t reason me through this, there’s nothing rational about my anxiety.” He’d snapped a little, then, because goddammit, he just wanted to help her, wanted to fix it all for her, and said, a little more harshly than he’d intended, “I have anxiety too, you know.” It has since sunk in to him that while they both have anxiety, and while there are some similarities, like the way they both have a tendency to get a little overwhelmed, a little desperate in a ‘caged animal’ sort of way when they’re in large, crowded situations where they felt like they have no control, they are actually very different brands of anxiety. 

His is almost purely social, that panicked feeling taking over sometimes out of the blue on a busy movie set, or just before a premiere. Hers is far more internal. He’ll watch her command a large crowd, something like standing on a stage making truly impromptu speeches about senior students after their very last high school show (always impromptu, because she can never bring herself to plan anything out in advance) with grace and composure and just a few happy, proud tears spilling out onto her cheeks, only to talk her down as she spins out a few hours later because she’s convinced she’d said something to someone in a one-on-one conversation, likely one the other person has already forgotten, that was unintentionally hurtful or offensive or just didn’t come off the way she meant it to. Her anxiety is almost always centered on the false belief that she’s hurt someone, let someone down, failed, in some way. 

She’s also an empath to an almost extreme level, feeling everyone else’s emotions nearly as strongly as she feels her own. While that could be assumed to be a positive thing, and often is, when combined with her anxiety it means that not only does she hurt when someone else hurts, it also means she makes it her fault, or at least her responsibility to fix. So while almost none of those issues she’d brought up in regards to the election and the (hopefully soon-to-be-former) president directly affect her - she’s a straight, white, middle-class woman who has no immigrants in her family for as far back as she can trace her bloodline and who is healthy and in good shape and has decent healthcare coverage through her employer - she feels it just as deeply as if every single one of those issues touched her life on a daily basis. And for her, they do, because they affect people she loves. (Or not even always people she loves, but just  _ people,  _ in general, which hurts her just as much.) He knows that might be a lot for some people to handle (she’d told him, early on, that  _ she  _ was a lot for people to handle; he thinks he handles her just fine, and is glad to do it). He doesn’t mind telling her every other day, sometimes more, that she’s overthinking or overexplaining something. He doesn’t even mind that he’s spending his Wednesday morning - her day to have no live classes to teach and his day to, he had hoped, spend the day spoiling and romancing her and making up for lost time and a stressful several months - trying to bring her back from this dark place she’s fallen into, because he knows how she got there, he  _ gets  _ it now, and he knows that it’s all only because of the way she cares, the way she loves. 

So instead of talking, adding more noise, he pulls her back against him where she’d sat up straight, kissing her forehead along the way then settling his cheek on top of her damp hair. He knows she knows how he feels about the situation, that those same things are killing him too, that he’s seeing-red-angry over the fact that so many people out there want to see his brother lose his right to one day marry the person he loves, would make it so that if his little sister ever found herself in a situation where she needed to take control over her reproductive health, she wouldn’t be able to (he believes just as strongly in  _ her  _ right to do the same thing, should it ever come to that and should it be what she wanted to do, he just doesn’t think, right now, that they’re likely to ever be in that situation, partly because they’re insanely careful and partly because he is pretty sure, based on past conversations, that if the unlikely did happen, they’d decide, together, to become parents), believe that it’s okay to treat people poorly because of their race or the fact that they weren’t born in the United States. He agrees with her completely and he knows she’s never doubted that. And since he doesn’t need to convince her that he’s on her side, all he’s worried about is making sure she knows that she’s been heard, that she can always come to him when she feels like this (rather than going to hide in his shower, but that’s a discussion for another time), that together, they’ll ride it out.

A while later, he doesn’t really know how long, she nuzzles her cheek against his shoulder and kisses the side of his neck and he pulls away to look down at her. She’s still not looking up at him, but her eyes are a little less glassy than they were before even as she continues to stare down at their laps. He cups her cheek with his palm and swipes his thumb under her eye, then pushes her hair away from her face and holds it back with his hand on the back of her head. “You wanna lay back down?” he asks her, tipping his head back toward the pillows at the head of the bed.

“I’m not gonna be able to sleep,” she mumbles.

“That’s okay. We’ll just lay here for a while.” She finally tilts her head back and blinks up at him a couple times and she must be satisfied with what she sees because she nods. “Okay.” He steadies her hips as she scoots off the end of the bed and goes to stand right in front of him. “You wanna keep the towel?” She looks down at it like she’d forgotten it was there then shakes her head and pulls it from her body, folding it in half twice before handing it to him. He stands and rests his palm on the warm, bare skin of her lower back. She turns toward the side of the bed she always sleeps on and he takes a step in that direction, the pressure of his hand on her back urging her to do the same. “You want me to get you some clothes?” He pretty much always sleeps naked, but a good 50% of the time or more she wears at least panties, often a t-shirt too, when she slips between the sheets. 

“No,” she shakes her head, “I’m okay.”

“Okay,” he agrees, his thumb drifting over the base of her spine as he takes the few steps with her to where the sheet and comforter are folded down below the pillows. He reaches around her to grab them, lifting them from the mattress so she can easily climb in. He lowers the covers back over her, even tucking them around her shoulders a little, and takes a step back, turning back in the direction they’d just come. 

“No,” she says almost desperately, and he stops in his tracks and looks back at her. “I want, can you stay with me? I’ll think too much if I’m alone.” He backtracks, undoing the couple steps he’d just taken, and leans down, draping the towel over his shoulder as he does so that his hand is free to curl around the side of her neck as he kisses her.

“I’m not leaving,” he tells her, his lips brushing hers with every syllable. “I was just gonna drop the towels in the hamper, call Dodger up, if that’s okay?” He feels her lips curl into the tiniest semblance of a smile beneath his, and maybe later he’ll take the time to wonder if he should be offended that he can’t seem to get her to smile but his dog can. Right now, he’ll just be grateful for whatever puts it there.

He does just what he told her he was going to, grabbing his laptop from the bookshelf on the other side of the room to put on the nightstand just in case they decide they want to pull up something on Netflix or Hulu, Disney-plus, maybe, and by the time he’s finally ready to lay next to her, Dodger is already stretched out on her other side, his head on her stomach as she strokes her fingers through his fur. He can’t help but smile at the sight, in spite of the circumstances that got them here, and think that he wouldn’t mind seeing it a lot more often - like every day for the rest of his life.

He lifts the blankets on his side and drops down onto the mattress on his butt, swinging his feet up and shuffling - wiggling, really - to the center of the mattress to meet her. She doesn’t roll onto her side like she normally does, likely because she doesn’t want to disturb the furry little attention whore who’s now thrown two of his paws over her legs in addition to the head on her stomach, but she lifts her head and shoulders just enough for him to get his arm under them, and when she lowers back down she tilts her head so that it lays on his chest.

“I’m sorry I’m so much,” she tells him after a minute, the hand that’s not petting Dodger drawing circles over his thigh on top of the blankets.

His hand, which had been tracing lightly up and down her arm, stills, curling around her wrist. “You’re the perfect amount,” he tells her, even though it doesn’t make all that much sense. It makes sense to him, and he knows it will to her. He leans over to kiss the top of her head and adds, “I’m sorry everything sucks.”

“You don’t suck,” she tells him, squeezing his leg lightly.

She still sounds sad, forlorn, even, and he doesn’t think he’s seen the last of this particular anxiety response, especially depending on what they see whenever they emerge from the bedroom and look at CNN again. But she doesn’t sound completely broken anymore, she sounds like something close to her normal self again, if a very subdued version of that, and if that’s all he’s going to get for now, he’ll take it.

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned at the beginning, while there are similarities, this is not the same character as the Narrator in "Starting Over." This was meant to be a random one-off just to try to help fill the deep need I've had in my soul for the past few days, but before I'd even finished this one I was thinking about other events in this world, mainly the things that got them to this point. So, with that being said, there MAY eventually be more stories within this world. We shall see.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [... But Better](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27450988) by [msred](https://archiveofourown.org/users/msred/pseuds/msred)




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